Ruling Not Expected To Affect Cases In Palm Beach County

Just one day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled jurors -- not judges -- must decide if killers get death sentences or life in prison, attorneys for recently convicted murderer William Coday said Tuesday they want a new penalty phase for him.

Coday, 45, was sentenced to death this month in Broward County for using two hammers and a knife to beat and stab Gloria Gomez 144 times, killing her, in July 1997.

In Palm Beach County, prosecutors predicted the ruling won't have an effect on the cases of the 12 men they sent to Death Row. That's because there were no cases of a judge overruling a jury's recommendation for life, said Mike Edmondson, spokesman for the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office.

Two of those Death Row inmates, John Chamberlain, 24, and Thomas Thibault, 26, gave up their right to have a jury recommend life or death. They were sentenced to die for killing three people during the 1998 Thanksgiving Day massacre in West Palm Beach.

Prosecutors and Chamberlain's attorney, Gregg Lerman, agreed that the ruling won't affect those cases either. Lerman said the two men knowingly gave up their right to have a jury consider their sentence, leaving it to the judge.

The ruling from the nation's highest court has many local defense attorneys scrambling to figure out if they can use it to try to save their clients' lives.

While lawyers are divided on whether it will affect few, many or all of the state's death convicts, prosecutors also are preparing to fight off the pile of appeals they expect as the lower courts begin deciding how many local cases are affected.

"It appears to me that Florida may not be as adversely affected as some defendants and their attorneys may hope," said Carolyn McCann, the head of the Broward State Attorney's Office appeals unit.

She expects defense attorneys will file a lot of documents trying to overturn death sentences, delay penalty phases or halt sentencings. But she thinks the U.S. Supreme Court ruling is clear on the point that fewer cases will be affected in Florida and other states that follow a jury recommendation than are affected in states such as Arizona, where the judge makes the decision.

Many defense attorneys disagree.

"The State Attorney's Office close their eyes and say it's not going to affect many cases, but I think it's going to affect everyone on Death Row here," said Richard Rosenbaum, a Fort Lauderdale-based lawyer who has handled numerous high-profile appeals.

He said he thinks the decision means juries must now specifically say which aggravating factors were proved in order to sentence someone to death.

"We haven't followed that in any of the cases that have put people on Death Row in Florida," Rosenbaum said.

That position already has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, McCann said.

In some other states, jurors have to write on the verdict form how they voted on different aggravating factors, such as were the defendant's actions especially cruel or for financial gain? And they must unanimously find aggravating factors are proved before they can vote on death or life.

Florida does not require the jury to reveal which aggravating factors were proved or not. Courts only get the jury's verdict and the breakdown of the vote for death.

Judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys likely will get a clearer sense of how many Florida cases could be affected on Thursday, when the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on two Florida Death Row inmates, Linroy Bottoson and Amos King, whose executions were postponed while the Arizona case was being decided.

In Coday's murder case, his public defenders George Reres and Sandra Perlman said that if they had known what the U.S. Supreme Court would rule in Ring v. Arizona, they would have made different strategic decisions on how to handle the case, Reres said.

A Broward jury voted 9-3 earlier this month to recommend the former Broward County librarian should be executed for killing his ex-girlfriend in Fort Lauderdale in 1997.

On July 8, Coday's attorneys are scheduled to present more evidence about Coday's past and his psychiatric history to Broward Circuit Judge Alfred Horowitz to try to persuade him to give Coday life not death.

Coday's attorneys say they decided not to present evidence about his psychiatric history to the jury because, at the time, they knew they could later present it to the judge.

The judge had ruled that prosecutors could not tell the jury about Coday's prior manslaughter conviction for beating a woman to death in Germany in the late 1970s unless testimony about his psychiatric history opened that door. The defense opted to wait.

"If the judge is now bound by the jury's recommendation on sentencing, then strategically we were ineffective," said George Reres, one of Coday's assistant public defenders.